There are two focal points battling throughout
the course of The Debt. One
is the plot, which weaves back and forth between past and present (though mostly
the past); the other is the characters, who spend the movie's segments set in
the past attempting to actively confront history and the contemporary sections
trying to run away from it, despite the fact that it keeps returning to haunt
them. The thrusts of each,
individual timeline are, as a result, at odds with each other. The effect is, ultimately, a melodramatic rendering of a potentially
intriguing story, with the characters and their own story of remorse taking a
backseat to an unnecessarily labyrinthine execution of the overarching story.

In the present (1997), Rachel Singer (Helen
Mirren) is attending a celebration of the publication of her daughter Sarah's (Romi
Aboulafia) new book. It documents a
mission from 1966 in which Mossad agents, including Rachel, captured and killed
a Nazi fugitive hiding in plain sight in East Berlin. Also in attendance is Sarah's father Stephan Gold (Tom Wilkinson),
another of the agents who participated in the operation 30 years ago. The third David Peretz (Ciarán Hinds) kills himself in front of Stephan
on his way to the car that is meant to transport him to the reading.

As Rachel reads the critical passage of the
mission, she vividly recalls the details—how she courageously crawled with
pistol drawn after being viciously beaten to end the life of escaping runaway. The crowd applauds, but there's an emptiness in Sarah's reaction.

What follows is an extended flashback to the
actions that led to the culminating episode, with a younger Sarah (Jessica
Chastain) arriving in East Berlin to meet a younger David (Sam Worthington). At the apartment that is their safe house, she meets a younger Stephan (Marton
Csokas), a much louder partner than the quiet, reserved David.

This is the bulk of the screenplay's character
development, with the divergent personality types of David and Stephan and
Rachel falling somewhere in the middle—determined and occasionally fearful. In place of solid characterizations, screenwriters Matthew Vaughn, Jane
Goldman, and Peter Straughan (adapting an Israeli movie of the same name from
four years ago) set the trio up for a love triangle, as David watches amicably
from the shadows (Stephan jokes about whether or not David enjoys the company of
women until Rachel walks around in a towel after a bath) and Stephan takes a
more forthright approach (He seduces her a tough day of spying with a drink and
a piano). Director John Madden
handles the romantic entanglements with such restraint that they barely
register, let alone have any illuminating effect on our perception of the
participants.

Much like their role in the assignment at hand,
the three are merely tools of the plot, which is admittedly involving once
Rachel begins to confront their target. He
is Dr. Bernhardt (Jesper Christensen), better known to the three agents as
Dieter Vogel and better known to history as the "Surgeon of Birkenau,"
who performed horrendous medical experimentation on prisoners of the
concentration camp in Poland. When
they find them, he is working as a gynecologist at a local clinic, and Rachel
must battle her disgust for the man who winds up uncovering more personal
information about her than she would care for him to know (Chastain, a sturdy
presence throughout the movie, is especially effective in these scenes). The psychological sparring between Vogel and Rachel, David, and Stephan
continues after a failed attempt to transfer their prisoner out of Berlin,
though Vogel quickly becomes as monstrous as his reputation suggests. It's a perfectly reasonable move but one that makes the presence of a
wife (Brigitte Kren) to show some trace of humanity within him an extraneous
point.

The majority of the flashback, in fact, is
redundant, since the actual truth of the mission comes into question by its very
existence. It's a foregone conclusion that the trio's legend is dubious,
and that reality is where the movie's major moral quandary presents itself. Instead of dealing with it head-on, though, the script once again shifts
into yet another mission as Rachel tries to set things right.

It's
an uncomplicated solution to a complicated situation, and, with so much time
spent in the past, it doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of how the
characters are affected by the collected guilt and remorse of their error. The Debt serves as a fine enough outline of its events but lacks
any genuine depth of ideas or characterization.